prewaste

Ewaste is not a destination. It is a process. The process is most visible for me during staging, the phase where the broken and the useless take up enough valuable space that a trip to a recycler is in order.

Woot helped me bring some new ewaste into the house recently. They ran a special on Audyssey Lower East Side Media Speakers. I bit. I forgot that good things do not need special sale prices. These speakers now inhabit an ewaste phase that I don't really have nailed down in my evolving taxonomy. I own them. They don't do what I wanted them to do. I am now condemned to have them wander the house in absurd alternate use cases until they ultimately betray me by confusing or electrocuting some other family member.

I have been using Apple's AirPlay for home audio since the feature turned up in their original Airport Express base stations. I have several small zones and I don't ask much of my speakers. I have tried several times to find a decent pair of powered speakers that can be configured once, set high on top of a  bookshelf or cabinet together with the Express, and forgotten.

I think Apple missed a decent bet by not supporting USB speakers on the Express. They have always included a full size powered USB port that supports a narrow range of printers and one esoteric, obsolete USB remote control dongle Keyspan.

I tried for years to just use the Express as a USB power supply for cheap USB speakers that supported an aux. input. I then just patched the analog output of the Express into the aux. input of the speakers. This always worked for a while. The Express power supplies were never up to the task, though, and
several died after a few months of this treatment. Irritatingly, the first one lived long enough for me to taste success and hook speakers up to all the rest. They all died before I figured the speakers as culprits.

I want USB speakers because I want a single-outlet solution. I have several sets of the discontinued Logitech Z-5 and I'm quite happy with them though I can no longer find them new. I want the Express over other third-party AirPlay boxes because I know that I can put them out of reach and not worry about them for years at a time.

I eventually solved the power problem and kept a single socket with the PlugBug from Twelve South. The PlugBug sits against an Apple powerbrick-shaped object and interposes between the wall and the hidden female power receptacle inside an Apple brick. It effectively adds a USB charge port to your brick. The original Express units used the same replaceable power tip that Apple has supplied with laptop bricks for more than a decade. Apple's new Express units use a new design that eliminates the removable tip and makes the PlugBug unsuitable.

The Audyssey speakers seemed appealing. They are not too big, not too ugly, not too expensive (at Woot's price), and they include an optical SPDIF port that shoud accept digital tunes directly from the Express. They are also available. That's a big advantage over the Z-5.

The Audyssey speakers are not USB powered. I give up. The PlugBug is really no different than an outlet splitter anyway. The speakers have a volume knob that the Z-5s lack. I usually place speakers out of reach or out of sight and the volume knob doesn't get much use. I actually added inline attenuators (headphone volume controls) to the Z-5s so that I could statically balance my zones. The Audyssey knob could eliminate that hassle and small expense. In any case, the attenuator wouldn't work with SPDIF.

The crippling flaw is that Audyssey put a small microswitch behind the volume knob. You have to punch that switch to hear sound. The speakers turn themselves off half an hour after they decide the music is over. You have to punch the button again to hear music. There is no auto on. There is no remote. These speakers are useless as hidden AirPort speakers.

Audyssey does not acknowledge this as a product planning failure. They may actually think it was a good idea. With one cheap microswitch they were able to segment their product family into a cheap media speaker line for computer dorks who put up with flaws like this all the time and a more expensive line for proper AV types. They may have even missed a trick. They could have left the auto-off in their more expensive products and added an even more expensive Crestron add-in that could automatically poke the button and rotate the knob for you.

I surfed review sites and forums briefly in search of relief. It was typical forum fare. I was either right but out of luck, or I was wrong and symptomatic of obese Americans because I would not get up to press a button, or wrong and symptomatic of coal-burning Americans because I hate energy saving modes, or wrong because I was trying to do whole house audio without fully funding some audio peddler's new spinnaker.

Perhaps Google will place an Audyssey ad next to this post and pay me a dollar if you click it. If I get ten ad clicks from this post, I'll take the speakers apart and defeat this auto-off or kill them trying. I'll post the result here.